[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ibn/ijefaa/v15y2023i8p14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Smart Money in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

Author

Listed:
  • George Chang
  • James Feigenbaum
Abstract
Although bracket pools in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament are a game, in practice most players do not compete strategically. Instead, they are more likely to choose brackets as though they are playing a lottery. When faced with such unsophisticated opponents, the game simplifies to a finance problem where you must choose an optimal portfolio of brackets. The brackets that pay the highest return are modal brackets in which higher seeds are always picked to beat lower seeds until the Final Four. When playing multiple brackets, the optimal strategy is to diversify across possible winners in the first round of the Final Four. We have found both theoretically and empirically that enormous returns can be earned with this approach.

Suggested Citation

  • George Chang & James Feigenbaum, 2023. "Smart Money in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 15(8), pages 1-14, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:ibn:ijefaa:v:15:y:2023:i:8:p:14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijef/article/download/0/0/48945/52762
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijef/article/view/0/48945
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bryan Clair & David Letscher, 2007. "Optimal Strategies for Sports Betting Pools," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 55(6), pages 1163-1177, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stekler Herman O. & Klein Andrew, 2012. "Predicting the Outcomes of NCAA Basketball Championship Games," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-10, March.
    2. David Bergman & Carlos Cardonha & Jason Imbrogno & Leonardo Lozano, 2023. "Optimizing the Expected Maximum of Two Linear Functions Defined on a Multivariate Gaussian Distribution," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 35(2), pages 304-317, March.
    3. Phillip E. Pfeifer, 2016. "The promise of pick-the-winners contests for producing crowd probability forecasts," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 81(2), pages 255-278, August.
    4. Martin B. Haugh & Raghav Singal, 2021. "How to Play Fantasy Sports Strategically (and Win)," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(1), pages 72-92, January.
    5. David Bergman & Jason Imbrogno, 2017. "Surviving a National Football League Survivor Pool," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 65(5), pages 1343-1354, October.
    6. Phillip E. Pfeifer & Yael Grushka-Cockayne & Kenneth C. Lichtendahl, 2014. "The Promise of Prediction Contests," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 68(4), pages 264-270, November.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R00 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General - - - General
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ibn:ijefaa:v:15:y:2023:i:8:p:14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Canadian Center of Science and Education (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepflch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.